The Mountain
What It’s Like to Lose Your Short-Term Memory
Short-term memory dominates all tasks—in cooking, for instance: I put the water to boil in a pot on the stove and remember that the water will boil while I chop the onions. I will put the sauté pan on the stove to heat up the oil for the onions, and I will then put the…
The Great Con Continues
Bloomberg recently breathlessly trumpeted the following regarding hedge fund behemoth Bridgewater – Ray Dalio Makes Clients $4.9 Billion in 2016 as Paulson, Soros Falter Their article was accompanied by the following table of returns – When you look at the table $4.9B is a lot of money in absolute terms and it is here that…
Lifelong Learning Is Good for Your Health, Your Wallet, and Your Social Life
In 2015 Doreetha Daniels received her associate degree in social sciences from College of the Canyons, in Santa Clarita, California. But Daniels wasn’t a typical student: She was 99 years old. In the COC press release about her graduation, Daniels indicated that she wanted to get her degree simply to better herself; her six years of school during that…
Turn It Up To 11
This Is Spinal Tap co-creators Christopher Guest and Michael McKean, along with the 1984 film’s director Rob Reiner, are now co-plaintiffs in Harry Shearer’s lawsuit against Vivendi and StudioCanal after allegedly being denied rightful profit participation from the rockumentary classic. On Tuesday, an amended lawsuit was filed in California federal court that also ups the damages demanded from…
All It Takes Is One
I wanted to follow on from yesterdays post and give a more extreme real world example of how thinking in terms of the need to be right is completely wrong but typical of the vast majority of traders. I went back and reviewed some results from the Dow from 2014 – this year stuck in…
A Question I Often Ponder
Is can you be too stupid to trade and the answer is obviously yes. If you are defeated by how your toaster works then trading is not for you, nor is anything else probably. However, my observation over the decades has been that despite what the industry would have you believe trading is not that…
Don’t set goals for yourself
A lot of my friends are spending the month of January “going dry” or giving up sugar or training for marathons. I can relate. As a Type-A, goal-oriented masochist, I tend to make deeply ambitious New Year’s resolutions each year. Witness Exhibit A: My resolutions from 2016. I’m embarrassed to say that not one lasted…
Gold Stocks
In this weeks Talking Trading I mention the idea of taking a strategic observation and making some tactical decisions around it. My global overview is that at present precious metals and in particular gold are moving. This is evidenced by my systems generating buy signals across a variety of time frames. It has been awhile…
The Science of Making Decisions
Imagine the most mind-numbing choice you’ve faced lately, one in which the possibilities almost paralyzed you: buying a car, choosing a health-care plan, figuring out what to do with your 401(k). The anxiety you felt might have been just the well-known consequence of information overload, but Angelika Dimoka, director of the Center for Neural Decision…
Why It’s Good To Be Wrong
That human beings can be mistaken in anything they think or do is a proposition known as fallibilism. Stated abstractly like that, it is seldom contradicted. Yet few people have ever seriously believed it, either. That our senses often fail us is a truism; and our self-critical culture has long ago made us familiar with…
Peculiarities Of The Dow
One of the intriguing quirks of financial history is that the Dow Jones Index has become the benchmark of the health of the US stockmarket and by extension a metric everyone else is fascinated in.It is interesting that the Dow has become this because of its strange mechanism of calculation and is somewhat anachronistic view…
Growing older with health and vitality
The preservation of skeletal muscle mass and strength with advancing age are, we propose, critical aspects of ageing with health and vitality. Physical inactivity and poor nutrition are known to accelerate the gradual age-related decline in muscle mass and strength—sarcopenia—however, both are subject to modification. The main purpose of this review is to present the…
